Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
johnzajac@dice.camp ("John") wrote:

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000

Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
cocoaphony ("Rob Napier") wrote:

RE: https://dice.camp/@johnzajac/115845954658479816

I spent a lot of time in the 90s working on Y2K. It wasn't a huge panic. It was just a slice out of everything else we spent auditing code. It wasn't "spend 80 hours a week fixing this." It was just boring. Incredibly boring. And we made it be ok by being bored and fixing stuff.

And the one thing I never thought would happen was that people would say it was never a problem. Oh good grief, it was a problem. All over. We just fixed it. Like we thought grownups should do when there's a problem.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lucydev@wetdry.world ("Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝") wrote:

alr the sentence "the most human thing there is is learning and creativity. the least human thing there is is trying to automate that away." goes so hard imma drop it in my bio now

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
lapcatsoftware ("Jeff Johnson") wrote:

WebKit is vibe coded now. Prepare for more bugs, as if there weren’t enough already.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/ceb4a05a51792bd00d02a515945edc092ca6ac6b

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Going all “but it works great for me” even as the industry burns around you and the “it” is a right-wing political project built on disregarding consent, being applied to dismantle public infrastructure and institutions, is fundamentally a dick move.

And debating dicks is pointless.

/fin

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Everybody being forced to use the tools to increase output even when they themselves don't think it's safe or right

The software made by the software industry is getting substantially worse every month. The products are getting worse. The platforms are getting worse. The ecosystems are less safe. And the job environment is horrible. And it's happening faster and faster.

9/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

We all know why. The gigantic, impossible to review, pull requests. Commits that are all over the place. Tests that don't test anything. Dependencies that import literal malware. Undergraduate-level security issues. Incredibly verbose documentation completely disconnected from reality

Senior engineers who have regressed to an undergraduate-level understanding of basic issues and don't spot beginner errors in their code, despite having "thoroughly reviewed" it.

8/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Shit is getting bad out in the actual software economy. Cash registers that have to be rebooted twice a day. Inventory systems that randomly drop orders. Claims forms filled with clearly “AI”-sourced half-finished localisation strings. I see more and more in the lives of people around me every day.

7/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Even if it were true that the effect for them personally is positive, that is objectively and manifestly not scaling up to system level. We can all see it. Software as an ecosystem has rapidly become less stable, less secure, worse designed and outright less productive for the end user.

6/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Even if you disregard context—the political climate, hostility toward labour, attacks on education and media, the alienation increasing the risk of psychological episodes—these "systems thinkers" no longer seem to understand that software is a system built on the labour of thousands.

5/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Nor do they seem to care, except in a performative way, that “AI” is designed to be an outright attack on labour and education, non-consensually using the works of those being attacked as the tools for dismantling their own communities and industries, all in overt collaboration with the ultra right

4/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Most of them are up to their eyebrows in Cialdini-style cognitive traps and have completely lost sight of the fact that subjective experiences don't tell you anything about the effects on a system, organisation, industry, or community. Anything sensible will likely fall on deaf ears

3/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Anybody looking past "ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes" won't be persuaded by a meaningful study. They're attempting to maintain their benefit by negotiating the level of "acceptable" abuse. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda

2/n

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

I stopped trying to debate software devs on LLMs a while back. Even if they could be budged on empirical grounds, they are explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical

Debating people who look past "chatbot psychosis", the dismantling of the education system, the gendered abuse, the generated CSAM images, the overt attacks on the media industries, or the ultra-right's glee about "AI", by showing them a well-constructed academic study is never going to work 1/n

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
Tutanota wrote:

Age verification is spreading like cancer.

First they came for adults site and social media; now they are already discussing about putting VPNs and app stores behind #AgeVerfication 🇬🇧🇦🇺

What’s sold as “online safety” means #surveillance via IDs checks or face scans.

Privacy & anonymity protect journalists, whistleblowers & activists.

We must fight against age verification - or the free web dies!

👉 More: https://tuta.com/blog/age-verification-kills-anonymity

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
ldcd@treehouse.systems ("Aled;cd") wrote:

Its a well known fact that the 4 CPU architectures are x86-64, aarch64, riscv64, and s390x

Nobody has ever actually directly observed s390x but, like dark matter, we can infer its existence through compiler support

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
bri7@treehouse.systems ("Luci Bitchface Angerfoot") wrote:

fediverse does not need to “compete” with twitter, bluesky or threads

fediverse does not need to be the town square

fediverse does not need to replicate the capitalistic attention optimising UI patterns of other social networks

fediverse does not need to add features to burn out your dopamine just as fast as other social networks.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
adactio ("Jeremy Keith") wrote:

Journal: The datalist element on iOS 26

Once again, Safari has fucked up its implementation.

🔗https://adactio.com/journal/22360

db@social.lol ("David Bushell ☕") wrote:

If I'm AWOL tomorrow my home network is FUBAR

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
vkc@linuxmom.net ("Veronica Explains") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@%5Felena/115909375706083994

Aside: this is a *major* reason why I quit Bluesky and deleted my account some months back.

I would block a baddie, and because that crap is PUBLIC on Bluesky (?!?), that basically creates a "hate list" that's easily exploitable. And of course folks were exploiting it!

If you're going to use Bluesky, strongly recommend not blocking folks unless they're specifically harassing you. And don't block big accounts, that crap can come back to haunt you.

I went the other way, and deleted my account.

Boosted by jwz:
VictimOfSimony@infosec.exchange ("Pseudonymous :antiverified:") wrote:

@jwz

#Gojira / #Godzilla is a:

Boosted by jwz:
sarahjeong.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("sarah jeong") wrote:

this is what the nail girlies are up to

Boosted by jwz:
RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

Radical stickers seen around NYC

Boosted by jwz:
ghibli@beep.town ("Studio Gifli") wrote:

Attachments:

• gifv: Those stupid murderers...

Boosted by jwz:
RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

"Be Gay, Hate Cops"
Seen in Valence, France

jwz wrote:

Did Godzilla have feathers? TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The insanity this administration is fostering around Greenland and NATO are only possible because of a VP and cabinet that cannot understand the clear evidence of 25th Amendment incapacity it implies, and a Congress willing to play along.

A primary on both their houses.

jwz wrote:

Singer just referred to Godzilla as a "lizard" and I have taxonomic *opinions* on this.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

It absolutely has to do with the algorithm, or lack there of. There isn't a robot monitoring what I respond to and adjusting what I see based on those responses.

There's no invisible force working to maximize the number of ad impressions served by keeping me in an anxious feedback loop.

I've said these things before but it's really hitting me tonight how valuable this place truly is.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

You know that feeling you get when you’re on a microblogging platform for too long? You kind of feel horrible and vaguely angry and anxious.

I’ve never once felt like that on Mastodon. That’s gotta be worth something.